Satellite signal based positioning technologies, which are mainly used outdoors, are usually not suited to deliver a satisfactory performance when used for indoor positioning, since satellite signals of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), like the global positioning system (GPS), do not penetrate through walls and roofs strongly enough for an adequate signal reception indoors. Thus, these positioning technologies are not able to deliver a performance indoors that would enable seamless, equal and accurate navigation experience outdoors and indoors.
Therefore, several dedicated solutions for indoor positioning have been developed and commercially deployed during the past years. Examples comprise solutions that are based on pseudolites, which are ground based GPS-like short-range beacons, ultra-sound positioning solutions, Bluetooth low energy (BLE) based positioning solutions, cellular network based positioning solutions and wireless local area network (WLAN) based positioning solutions.
In a network-centric positioning solution, a plurality of hubs may for example be deployed in the environment for which a positioning solution is to be provided. The hubs may scan for radio signals (e.g. Bluetooth signals) transmitted by mobile devices (e.g. tag devices) and may provide observation reports representing scanning results to a positioning server. When at least three hubs (preferably more than three hubs) observe radio signals from a certain mobile device, the positioning server may determine an estimated position of the mobile device by triangulation, multilateration or trilateration.